On the Wall: Assaf Evron

About the Exhibition

On the Wall: Assaf Evron is the third installment in PCG’s On the Wall program, an annual commission of immersive artworks applied directly to the walls of the gallery. It is presented as part of an interdisciplinary initiative at the College to explore rich traditions and develop new scholarship around the mural as conceptual art form.

In celebration of its centennial year, Providence College, in collaboration Bridgewater State University, acquired a collection of late 19^th and early 20^th century documentary images from the École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem. Using the École biblique images of the Holy City and Temple Mount/Haram Al-Sharif in Jerusalem as inspiration, artist Assaf Evron creates a photo-collage architecture on the gallery walls composed of two-dimensional geometric shapes and patterns cut from wallpaper printed with the artist’s one-to-one, polychromatic photographs of Zekediah’s Cave, a limestone quarry just beneath the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. Evron’s compositions simultaneously allude to the layered structures and histories of Jerusalem’s natural and build environments, including the Temple Mount/Haram Al-Sharif, the legendary Damascus and Herod’s gates, and the Modernist modularity of post-WWII architecture. With this complex series of visual analogies between the ancient-to-modern hybridity of the greater region, On the Wall: Assaf Evron charts recurring forms and themes across a multitude of overlapping historical, cultural, and political narratives.